Logo

A powerful, easily deployable network traffic analysis tool suite

Quick Start

Documentation

Components

Supported Protocols

Configuring

Arkime

Dashboards

Hedgehog Linux

Contribution Guide

Linux host system configuration

Docker

Installing Docker

Docker installation instructions vary slightly by distribution. Please follow the links below to docker.com to find the instructions specific to your distribution:

After installing Docker, because Malcolm should be run as a non-root user, add your user to the docker group with something like:

$ sudo usermod -aG docker yourusername

Following this, either reboot or log out, then log back in.

Docker starts automatically on DEB-based distributions. On RPM-based distributions, users must start Docker manually or enable it using the appropriate systemctl or service command(s).

You can test Docker by running docker info, or (assuming you have internet access), docker run --rm hello-world.

Installing docker compose

Please follow this link on docker.com for instructions on installing the Docker Compose plugin.

Operating system configuration

The host system (i.e., the one running Docker) must be configured for the best possible OpenSearch performance. Here are a few suggestions for Linux hosts (these may vary from distribution to distribution):

# the maximum number of open file handles
fs.file-max=2097152

# increase maximums for inotify watches
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=131072
fs.inotify.max_queued_events=131072
fs.inotify.max_user_instances=512

# the maximum number of memory map areas a process may have
vm.max_map_count=262144

# decrease "swappiness" (swapping out runtime memory vs. dropping pages)
vm.swappiness=1

# the maximum number of incoming connections
net.core.somaxconn=65535

# the % of system memory fillable with "dirty" pages before flushing
vm.dirty_background_ratio=40

# maximum % of dirty system memory before committing everything
vm.dirty_ratio=80
# maximum number of TCP retransmissions
net.ipv4.tcp_retries2=5
# the maximum number of open file handles
* soft nofile 65535
* hard nofile 65535
# do not limit the size of memory that can be locked
* soft memlock unlimited
* hard memlock unlimited

OR the file /etc/systemd/system.conf.d/limits.conf containing:

[Manager]
# the maximum number of open file handles
DefaultLimitNOFILE=65535:65535
# do not limit the size of memory that can be locked
DefaultLimitMEMLOCK=infinity
# change disk read-adhead value (# of blocks)
blockdev --setra 512 /dev/sda

After making allthese changes, do a reboot for good measure!

Podman

See Docker vs. Podman.